The default rules of corporate law make shareholders’ control rights a function of their voting power. Whether a director is elected or a merger is approved depends on how shareholders vote. Yet, in private corporations, shareholders routinely alter their rights by contract. This phenomenon of...

For the last twenty years, the dominant narrative of the over-the-counter derivatives market has been one of absent regulation, deregulation, and regulatory conflict, predictably resulting in disaster. This Article challenges this narrative, arguing that the global derivatives market has been...

Two major banks have now admitted that their employees successfully manipulated worldwide interest rates through the London InterBank Offered Rate, the most widely used interest rate index. Libor is the interest rate term for trillions of dollars of swaps and loans, and its manipulation may have...

Amid a financial crisis and credit crunch, retail investors are lending a billion dollars over the Internet, on an unsecured basis, to total strangers. Technological and financial innovation allows person-to-person (“P2P”) lending to connect lenders and borrowers in ways never before...

In securities markets, insider trading is a crime. In commodities, insider trading is almost completely legal. This divergent treatment has long been accepted as appropriate, given perceived differences between the markets. For example, it has been thought that futures traders are sophisticated...

This amicus brief, filed with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Gelboim v. Bank of America (LIBOR Manipulation Litigation), primarily aims to help the Court by providing relevant background information. Many of the plaintiffs in this case are bringing antitrust claims based on defendant...

Scholars and practicing lawyers alike consider legal entities to be essential. Who can imagine running a large business without using a business organization, such as a corporation or partnership? This Article challenges conventional wisdom by showing that vast enterprises – with millions of...

Substantial scholarship has questioned whether market manipulation is impossible and regulation unnecessary. This Article challenges orthodox understandings of manipulation, showing that they reflect an obsolete view of markets. While manipulation skeptics discuss prices, markets focus on...

Do investor time horizons lead to inefficient business conduct in the real economy? An extensive finance literature analyzes whether particular practices (e.g., high frequency trading and stock buybacks) lead firms to operate with inefficiently myopic investment horizons, and an extensive legal...

Federal law restricts insider trading. Yet these restrictions operate differently on insolvent or bankrupt firms. The law is less constraining in some respects: federal law extensively regulates the trading of residual claims in solvent firms but not insolvent firms. However, the law is more...